Artist Trust on Tour opens in Port Townsend tonight

PORT TOWNSEND — The Cotton Building this evening hosts Artist Trust on Tour — an exhibit featuring four artists from the Olympic Peninsula and Bellingham.

Artist Trust is a nonprofit arts organization based in Seattle.

The free exhibit begins at 6 p.m. at the Cotton Building at 607 Water St. It will feature traditional Japanese dancer Kazuko Yamazaki of Bremerton, poet Linda Bierds of Bainbridge Island and Jenna Bean Veatch and musician David Feingold of Bellingham.

During the event, the artists will perform, read, play music and celebrate art, according to a news release.

Attendees also are invited to a happy hour before the event, also at the Cotton Building, with beer and wine available.

Several other arts events organized by the nonprofit — including workshops and showcases — are planned through Sept. 24 at various venues in Port Townsend.

Port Townsend is the final stop of a statewide tour, which already has visited Spokane, Bellingham, Tacoma and Seattle.

Bierds teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington. Her ninth book of poetry, “Roget’s Illusion,” was published by Putnam’s in March 2014 and long listed for the 2014 National Book Award, according to the release.

Bierds’ poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Smithsonian, Poetry and The Best American Poetry: 2014.

Veatch is a multi-disciplinary performing artist who dances, acts, writes music, makes costumes and produces stop-action-animated films and short stories, according to the release.

Feingold is a musician and is currently a professor of music at Western Washington University in Bellingham, according to the release.

Feingold founded and developed the Guitar Studies Program at Western, the only program of its kind in the state of Washington, according to the release. He has recorded and released the album “The Boardwalk.”

Yamazaki is a dancer who has studied in the Hanayagi and Fujima schools of traditional Japanese dance in Tokyo and uses her unique perspective as a native performer with an embodied intercultural perspective, according to the release.

By discerning what is most essential in the tradition and distinguishing it from features that are incidental, styles that are particular to certain performers and cultural stereotypes, Yamazaki said she hopes to preserve traditional Japanese dance in its elements.